Pixel Purge

The fictional land of Pixela-RT witnessed years of prosperity. Now, a dark portal spews forth endless waves of Space Invaders inspired monsters intent on destroying all that is good and pixely. Luckily, volunteers from across the land take to the sky in small white spaceships to fend off the menace. Endless waves of enemies face down your small white ship on an apocalyptic top-down battlefield in this arena shooter from Epic Shadow.

Reminds me of uh... I don't remember. A game that was about walking around killing multi-colored blobs with you huge sword. Lot's of achievments and stuff. I believe there was an achievement called "it's only fun when it's frantic". Which applies to this game as well!

The main problem with this game is that the difficulty level of the enemies is based on your level.

I mean, on the surface it seems like a good idea, but it seriously discourages leveling up. At level 1, I'm much stronger than everyone else; at level 20 or so, I die pretty quickly. Sure, you also get the burst attack and the health, but I don't really think those make up for the difficulty. If the difficulty increased at set times, it would encourage you to level up and make you decide between getting combat skills to survive now and getting the leveling skills to be strong enough later. As it is, the magnet and pixel skills are really worse than useless, because they only make the game harder for you.

On a related note, the disparity between the utility of the skills is pretty bad. Firing speed and spread are good, but penetration and criticals have very little effect. Healing is sort of borderline; it's useless for the first few levels, but at level 4 or 5 it jumps to marginally useful.

It depends on how you play the game. If you're going for achievements, magnet and pixel upgrades combined are extremely useful, for two reasons. First of all, two or three of the achievement-nabbing baddies don't even show up until you're past level 18. Second, leveling up automatically heals you to full health. With full Pixel and Magnet Power ups, you can focus on dodging and staying alive until the next level up comes. Criticals become somewhat more useful later on as well, as the extra damage adds up with a higher fire rate and shot count. Piercing probably helps dealing with the mobs created by the brown, circle shaped enemies, but I didn't see much of a difference there.

Agreed, nice idea but it feels like it wasn't play-tested for balance. The only reason I continue to replay the game is that I hope to find a different way of playing that makes the game more reasonable. However, ultimately it's just a big mess and as much as I like the achievements and the action, it's not quite balanced and it's enough to make me look for other games. Amorphous is a fine game and a much better incarnation of this type of play.

This game had the potential to have a lot more content than it had. Take the prologue for instance. It was pretty sweet and made the player want to try to beat the game to see more of the story. But since the developer decided not to add another cutscene every 5 or so levels or make an end to the game, Pixel Purge fails to make the player want to keep playing. Kudos to the idea, though :)

I'm Porter, co-developer of the game. We've read all the reviews on ArmorGames, and I just went through all the comments on here. We agree the game fell pretty short on balancing, and I'm happy to let you all know that over the weekend we updated the entire game to be FAR more balanced. Piercing is now extremely effecting, health recovery is much more powerful now, and the other skills were adjusted as well.

While I can agree that leveling the difficulty of the game based on the players level is probably not the greatest way of going about it, I do enjoy trying to find a build that lets me get far. In the future, we likely won't use this mechanic anymore, but this was a test-run and we feel it works decently. I won't argue that it could have been much better without it though.

As for the game lacking content, agreed. As a game, this was originally supposed to be much simpler. If we decide to do a sequel, the story will be far more integrated, there will be an end, and there will be a lot more content.

Anyway, the newest version V.1.1.0 is going to be out soon, so pick your favorite site and play it there, there's a ton of fixes and balancing. Thanks again for all the feedback on the game, much appreciated.

Love this game. I'm totally addicted (and I really should be doing other stuff with my time; too bad). I was addicted even before the new versions, which are even better. The thing that puzzles me most about this game, though, is the regeneration. I know each level reduces it by half a second. But I don't know what that means. What is it that's gone down by a half a second? At level six it's going to be 3 whole seconds less. So, some time interval has been reduced. But an interval between what two things? It takes three seconds less to do what? At what is the original interval? Have I gone from five seconds to two, or from four to one, or what?
Also, it took me forever to figure out how the chains are calculated. It took me quite a while to figure out how to get that trophy.(I know, I'm thick.)
Otherwise, great game!

I appreciate that the developers respond to the feedback! As a result, I was willing to continue playing and it does feel a little better. Still, it's highly frustrating to get to the same part of the game and be swamped with 6 giants converging on your position with 2 shields blocking you and a seeker homing in. Max firepower or firepower + healing bonus doesn't help much. My average score is higher, but it still reaches a consistent plateau when I focus on offense and advancing.

I like the concept of this game, but maybe this particular one is not for me.

I discovered that if I played the most recent update, somehow I'm able to progress further and 'win'.

I had all trophies except the 'kill 2500', 'max regen', 'max shot speed', and 'kill king whatever the last one was'.

I maxed regen first, and it heals fast! I developed spread shot up to 5, then maxed shot speed. Then I started boosting pierce and critical, although I didn't get far with those. When I finally died, I was over level 24 and completed all those trophies I was missing.

Now hopefully the story will develop a little further, and maybe something new will come along for the fully-trophied to accomplish.

Adventure-mode perhaps?

[We have updated the links in the review above to point to the most recent version. Thanks for pointing out there was an update available! :) -Jay]

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